In A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens wrote of cold winters with snow as a matter of course. White Christmases were common during the Little Ice Age that lasted from the 1550s to the 1850s. Nowadays the chances of a snowfall on Christmas day are much lower, but the imagery of a white Christmas persists.

In this post we’ll generate our snowflakes instead.

Koch Snowflake

The Koch snowflake is a mathematical curve constructed from an equilateral triangle where each line segment is recursively altered:

The picture above was generated in the F# REPL, using WinForms to display a bitmap:

This weekend Evelina, Yan an I had the pleasure of speaking at f(by) the first dedicated functional conference in Belarus. It was a short hop by train from Vilnius to Minsk, where we had been attending Build Stuff. Sergey Tihon, of F# Weekly fame, was waiting for us at the train station to guide us to the hotel with a short tour of the city.

The venue was a large converted loft space, by the river and not far from the central station, with great views over the city. The event attracted over 100 developers from across the region, and we were treated to tea and tasty local cakes during the breaks.

Evelina was the first of us to speak and got a great response to her talk on Understanding Social Networks with F#.